Claire Bellerjeau Author

Claire Bellerjeau currently serves as Historian and Director of Education at Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay, New York, and has been researching the Townsend family and their slaves for nearly 15 years, including curating a yearlong exhibit on the Townsend “Slave Bible” in 2008. In 2015, during a research visit to the New York Historical Society, she discovered what may be one of the earliest poems ever written by Jupiter Hammon, America’s first published African-American writer. She has spoken internationally and published several articles in scholarly journals about life and artifacts of colonial New York. Bellerjeau lives with her husband Chris in Oyster Bay, New York.



Tiffany Yecke Brooks holds a PhD in American and Dramatic Literature from Florida State University, and has spoken and published widely on early portrayals of race in Trans-Atlantic performance as well as portrayals of the emerging American identity in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. She was the lead writer and researcher for the New York Times best-selling George Washington’s Secret Six, Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, and Andrew Jackson and the Miracle at New Orleans, with Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, and has served as the lead or contributing writer for five additional New York Times best-sellers. She lives in Oklahoma with her family.